His course made quite a sensation.

He was the first Anderson in the memory of Banbridge, where the name was an old one, to be outside the genteel pale of a profession.

His father had been a physician, his grandfather a clergyman.
"If my son had studied medicine instead of law, he could have at least subsisted upon the proceeds of his profession," his mother said, with the gentle and dignified dissent which was her attitude with regard to her son's startling move.

"People are simply obliged by the laws of the flesh to go through measles and whooping-coughs and mumps, and they have to be born and die, and when they get in the way of microbes they have to be ill and they have to call in a physician, and some few of them pay him, so he can manage at least to live.

Of course law is different.